Monday, October 03, 2011

While strolling the Boucheron book room last month, I stopped to chat with a fellow from Melville House Publishing. We gabbed for a few minutes and, when he found out that I was Detectives Beyond Borders, he said, "Here" and handed me a bagful of books including his company's reissue of Derek Raymond's Factory novels.

One chapter into I Was Dora Suarez, I find it hard to believe anyone has written noir better than Raymond. The chapter is shocking, violent, funny, and, perhaps most surprising, it gets inside the killer's head without getting melodramatic. (Or barely getting melodramatic, anyway. It flirts briefly with childhood trauma as an explanation for adult crimes, but happily drops the idea.)

But the chapter's neatest, most electrifyingly attention-grabbing tricks are the shifts from free-indirect speech, with the killer as point-of-view character, to first-person narration from the unnamed police protagonist, to quoted/direct speech for a second killing.

I'm not sure what this will all mean, but for now, it has grabbed my attention, especially when, almost without knowing it, I am in the cop's head rather than the killer's.

My favorite line so far:

"Bores and killers are much the same; dullness and despair explain most murders."

55 Comments:

Peter, Raymond's Factory series is some of the best noir I've ever read. I'll need to read them one more time (at least) before I feel confident about writing reviews. You've touched on the stylistic brilliance that grabbed me as I read.

I read a couple of these many years back at the suggestion of a friend. Very dark and very good. I don't think I got to Dona Suarez, though.

For years I was under the illusion that Raymond was actually the thriller writer Robin Cook, but it was actually another British writer, Robert Cook. I don't know why the synonym, but it's an honorable tradition in detective fiction.

Mack, I'd tried to read Raymond once before, but it was, for some reason, a false start. I still don't know how this current effort will turn out, but this opening is stunning. I mean, it's thematically raw and stylistically polished at the same time. That's pretty damned impressive.

He wrote his earlier stuff as Robin Cook-such as The Crust On It's Uppers- and then disappeared to France to avoid the law. When he wrote the Factory books it was, as you said, to avoid confusion with the thriller writer.

Robin Cook was also a pretty famous English politician who in the 90s was tipped as a potential Labour leader so a pseudonym was probably a good idea.

I've read two or three Raymond novels and I've always liked him. I know I've said this before several times on your blog (and elsewhere) but if an English boy goes to Eton and wants to become a great writer he will always fail because he will never understand working class life. The class system in the UK is just too rigid. David Cameron and his Chancellor are doomed never to understand a massive segment of their population and people like crime novelist Peter James will never write convincingly about the proletariat and their foibles.

The exceptions are people like Derek Raymond and George Orwell who both went to Eton but who both went to Paris and lived as pennyless bums. Raymond acutally got himself some real life experience and although he's not and never could be Jim Thompson at least he's not completely embarrassing when he writes working class dialogue like Peter James or on a higher level Rushdie or Martin Amis.

Adrian, as far as I can tell from the potted biographies of Raymond included with books, he veered away from a privileged life more sharply than Orwell ever did.

I don't know how he does with working-class characters, but in this book he does take us into the last days of a poor, old pensioner without, I think, too much in the way of condecension. And by god, his writing can make you laugh one page and break your heart the next.

I'd have to know more about Raymond's life before I could draw any plausible connection between the life and the work. As it happens, I'm sometimes skeptical of colorfully downmarket crime writers' biographies. They can seem too calculated to appeal to a lust for grit as glamour.

American protests that the US is a classless society cannot be taken seriously but English society is still much more moribund. Walk into NBC say and you dont find it dominated by chaps from Philips Exeter, but walk into the BBC and The Guardian and you will find public school boys running the show.

Its interesting and apposite that most of great American novelists of the twentieth century came from relatively humble backgrounds: Bellow, Faulkner, Hemingway, Roth, Heller, Steinbeck etc. Scott Fitzgerald is a notable exception, but he was definitely middle not upper class. The only really rich kid who became a successful novelist that I can think of is Gore Vidal and his books haven't dated that well.

Here in America we like to note how many of our presidents and presidential candidates and their appointees went to Harvard and Yake, but your point is well-taken. The figure of the toff is not nearly as ingrained in the popular imagination here.

Weren't Updike and Norman Mailer in the same graduating class at Harvard?

Well Salinger's an interesting case isnt he? Only one generation removed from dirt poor immigrants. And always feeling like an outsider because he was Jewish. Catcher in the Rye seethes with resentment against the rich kids...

I also like the fact that Salinger fought in World War 2 as an enlisted man, in the infantry (like Kurt Vonnegut) when he probably could have gotten an easier posting behind the lines.

Updike may spoil my argument but I'm afraid I dont know enough about Updike's oeuvre. I liked Rabbit Run but didn't feel I had to read the others.

I've really tried with James and Wharton but the tittle tattle of dull aristocrats just does not work for me. Wharton's a bit funnier (I remember a good line about an air conditioner). The later period Henry James is just insufferable.

But anyway thats my point. Its not a level playing field. The 5% of the English population who go to private school or boarding school know almost nothing about the other 95% who don't. That's why JK Rowling's books strike such a false note with me. This isn't England, this is England through the prism of a rather precious, prim, priggish, upper middle class plonker.

What was the Edith Wharton one about the woman who got too old to marry and her circumstances got narrower and narrower? That one was pretty good I'll grant you.

If you talk to Colm Toibin he'll try and convince you that Henry James was the greatest novelist who ever lived and that he was a really interesting guy to boot. I'm not convinced. Like many of his characters he fled the most interesting society on the planet for the stuffy drawing rooms of Edwardian England...

Dont know about the Arson book. I only read the back cover which looked pretty interesting but somehow I never got the motivation to actually read the thing.

Seana

Yeah The House of Mirth, I liked that one.

How did Henry James do it? He had a thought and then span it out for ten pages without any paragraph breaks. And then went back and wrote it in very elegant prose and added two or three paragraph breaks for those among his readers without his own mental toughness.

Actually, while we're on the subject of long, impenetrable prose, a friend of mine who knows I'm in this Finnegans Wake group had been reading David Boyer's Sidelong Glances of a Pigeon Kicker and sent me this:

"One of my favorite passages occurs when the protagonist, a young, disillusioned former teacher is reading a western novel while he dries his sheets @ the laundromat. A young woman comes in to the laundromat and unloads her clothes from a guitar case: When her clothes were in the washing machine she took Finnegans Wake from the case, crossed her booted legs, and began reading it. I snuck the western into my laundry bag. The girl was about halfway through the book and appeared unpuzzled by what she read. A page took her on the average of 45 sconds, which wasn't much more than what a page of the western took me. This was a remarkable girl. I decided that it would be worthwhile to marry her just so I coud watch her read Finnegans Wake with such style. I walked up to her, pointed at a washing machine, and said, "Riverruns circlesudsingly, don't you think?"She looked at me blankly. "In the washing machine," I explained. She continued to look at me blankly and didn't say anything. I said, "It's sort of a bewilderfusing book, isn't it?"She said, "Why don't you go back to your western?" and began to read again, humming. I said, "If you're going to be so darned pretentious, at least you could be friendly.""Go back to your western, little man.""

Oh, oh, Looks like you gave up on Derek Raymond again...? That is, no follow-up comments re I Was Dora Suarez.

Revisit the thread that followed your July 31 post... In it author Ray Banks mentions Raymond's memoirs, The Hidden Files. Peter, I highly recommend it to you. DR makes so many observations on writing and the writing life (in addition to such autobiographical details about dropping out of Eton at 16, etc.) that I think you would really find it most engaging. Even that old chestnut, thought-provoking. Blog post-provoking even.

Adrian, if you and other readers avoid Edith Wharton's Gilded Age novels because "the tittle tattle of dull aristocrats just does not work for me," may I suggest one of her Jazz Age novels such as The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922, or Twilight Sleep, 1927?

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This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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